And to top it off, TMBG won’t write him a song

February 19, 2009April 2, 2009 daelnorwood

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS is lecturing in Boston, on the cause of the Chinese War, and defends the policy of England towards China. The destruction of a few chests of opium, he said, was no more the cause of the war with China, than the throwing overboard of a few chests of tea was the case of the war of the American revolution, and he seemed to imply that one war was quite as righteous as the other! He denied them the right to exclude other nations from the reciprocal rights of trade, to establish a humiliating monopoly through their Hong merchants, and to demand from all foreign ambassadors the degrading ceremony of the Kou-tou, viz: knocking the forehead nine times on the ground in approaching the Emperor. This Kou-tou, he contended, was the cause of the war, and not, as many people falsely supposed, the opium question. The old man must be getting out of his senses.”

~Cleveland Daily Herald (Cleveland, OH), 30 November 1841

Oh, I love the way the editors can figure out who they hate on more:

(a) grammar mavens and other sticklers for consistent tense use (seriously)
(b) The Chinese ( “humiliating monopoly,” “degrading ceremony,” “knocking the forehead”)
(c) The British: (implied; public opinion was solidly anti-drug war, at the time)
or
(d) JQA (“The old man must be getting out of his senses”)

Extra bonus points: the database’s OCR for this article was a bit off, so the title of the article reads as “Joan Quincy Adams is lecturing in Boston…”

Guy just can’t catch a break, I mean seriously.